It’s all about TED

The organizers of TED — the super-cool, super exclusive conference coming up at the end of February in Monterey — briefed the media Monday about who’s going to be there and what they’ll be talking about.

Among the big names on the list are folks like former Vice President Al Gore, LiveAid founder Bob Geldoff, Bay Area writers Amy Tan and Dave Eggers, and genome genius Craig Ventor. Joining them will be off-beat luminaries like Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading mushroom experts. Put it all together and it should make for four days of high-minded, thought-provoking material.

AP

Al Gore returns to TED this year as a speaker.

Best of all, for the vast majority of people out there who are not attending, all the TED talks are viewable on the organization’s site, TED.com. The site has become one of the true, semi-hidden treasures of the Net, featuring over 200 speeches from world-class intellectuals that draw over a million visitors a month.

If you don’t know about TED, the name stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and the conference draws some of the world’s biggest thinkers to the Monterey Peninsula to bask in each other’s brilliance.

Here’s how the TED people describe it:

“Attendees have called it ‘The ultimate brain spa’ and ‘A four-day journey into the future.’ The audience — CEOs, financiers, inventors, intellectuals — is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Quincy Jones, Frank Gehry, Herbie Hancock and Bono.”

Well, as we mentioned earlier, it’s now clear who will be down at TED this year and what they’ll be discussing. Beyond the big names — which also include fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi — here are some of the other people and ideas that caught our attention:

–Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who studied her own stroke as it happened.

–Paul Rothemund, a “DNA origimast,” which has something with folding and genetics, and sounds fascinating.

–Brian Cox, a physicist at CERN who tries to recreate to “Big Bang” on a regular basis.

–Joshua Klein, an animal behavior expert who built a machine that trains crows to pick up change and deposit it in a slot in return for peanuts.

It’s all going to happen from Feb. 27 through March 1, so stay tuned to The Tech Chronicles, which is planning to attend and give you up-to-the-minute updates from TED 2008.